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Tom Wolfe said you can't go home again, but for Dr. Tom Greavette, coming home was always the plan.

Born and raised in St. Catharines, he left at the age of 18 to attend university, became a doctor and opened a practice. Seventeen years later, he has returned to St. Catharines and taken a position at the McMaster Niagara Family Health Centre on Ontario Street.

"I came back because of Caroline," Greavette said of his 12-month-old daughter.

"I always knew I wanted to raise my family in St. Catharines," he said.

Growing up in the city, he fondly remembers being in scouts and playing soccer. As he got older, he would work on local farms and vineyards during the summer.

His wife, Tamara, also grew up in St. Catharines. They went to different high schools, but met on a Russian exchange trip when they were both 17 and have been together ever since. Both knew they wanted to return home to raise their family.

"I want to be able to share the same community I grew up in," he said.

For Greavette, working at the McMaster Niagara Health Centre is bringing his medical career full circle. After completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo, and getting a master's degree at the University of Toronto in molecular medical genetics, Greavette headed to McMaster medical school. He will now be teaching the next generation of doctors going through the same medical program he did years earlier.

"I gain as much as I give when I teach because the medical students have fresh minds and are really up to date on guidelines and medications," he said. "So it keeps me just as educated as I'm educating them."

But its more than just teaching that attracted Greavette to the health centre.

"The clinic is just a perfect model of what we are trying to do, which is incorporate all sides of medicine," he said.

Family doctors now work in a team with social workers and nutritionists and pharmacists under the same roof, Greavette said.

Greavette is accepting new patients and begins working at the McMaster Niagara Family Health Centre on May 4.

"We always knew we wanted to come back, but it was just a matter of timing," he said.